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Thursday, February 28, 2013

A spinning supermassive black hole lives in the heart of the nucleus of NGC 1365, a nearby galaxy some 56 million light-years away -- and now we know how fast it's spinning!

Astronomers have directly measured the spin of a black hole for the first time by detecting the mind-bending relativistic effects that warp space-time at the very edge of its event horizon -- the point of no return, beyond which even light cannot escape.

We also now know that supermassive black holes are inexorably linked to the galaxies that encircle them.

For example, the size of a supermassive black hole appears to have a direct correlation to the galaxy where it exists. Almost a decade ago, researchers calculated that the mass of a supermassive black hole appeared to have a constant relation to the mass of the central part of its galaxy, known as its bulge (think of the yolk in a fried egg). This 1 to 700 relationship supports the notion that the evolution and structure of a galaxy is closely tied to the scale of its black hole.

Other studies found another strong correlation. This one was between the mass of a supermassive black hole and the orbital speed of stars in the outer regions of their galaxy where the direct gravitational influence of the supermassive black hole should be weak: the larger the black hole, the faster the outer stars travel.

Thus it's now believed that black holes are not only common throughout the Cosmos but they play a fundamental role in the formation and evolution of the Universe we inhabit today.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

A new study has estimated that we will be able to detect oxygen in the atmosphere of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars within the next decade.

This would be a huge leap forward in the search for extraterrestrial life.

A new study finds that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a habitable planet orbiting a white dwarf (as shown in this artist's illustration) much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star. Here the ghostly blue ring is a planetary nebula -- hydrogen gas the star ejected as it evolved from a red giant to a white dwarf. (Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA))

Even dying stars could host planets with life -- and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Electronic devices are getting smaller, thinner and more flexible — taking them into areas other electronics can’t go. One place is the mind. Electrical engineer Todd Coleman at the University of California at San Diego, for example, is using super-thin flexible electronic “tattoos” to read brain wave activity in a non-invasive way and use that data to control machines.

PHOTOS: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Tattoos

Coleman’s devices, which about the width of a human hair, stick to a person’s forehead and detect electrical signals from the brain. In previous studies, his team found that study participants could remotely fly airplanes around a room using their mind. These people were not wearing the thin tattoo-like stickers but wearing electrode caps that pick up brain wave activity. But if such control can come from the cap, it could be possible to shrink it down to the stick-on tattoo level, which Coleman says his team is working on.

The small, flexible devices could also be put on the throat and behave as subvocal microphones through which people could communicate silently and wirelessly and perhaps improve speech recognition in smartphones.

EXCELLENT IDEA OF THE DAY: Tooth Tattoos

“We’ve demonstrated our sensors can pick up the electrical signals of muscle movements in the throat so that people can communicate just with thought,” Coleman told Txchnologist.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Red_Rectangle New evidence has been discovered that reinforces the panspermia thoery that the red rain which fell in India in 2001, contained cells unlike any found on Earth. Panspermia is the idea championed by physicist Fred Hoyle that life exists throughout the universe in comets, asteroids and interstellar dust clouds and that life of Earth was seeded from one or more of these sources.

Picture of the rad rain. India 2001

In 1903, in the German journal Umschau, Svante Arrhenius removed the meteors from the equation. Instead, he wrote, individual spores wafted throughout space, colonizing any hospitable planet they lit on. Arrhenius named the theory panspermia.

A growing body of evidence suggests that it might be Hoyle and Arrhenius might have been correct.

For example, various insects such as have been shown to survive for months or even years in the harsh conditions of space. the Allen Hills Mars meteorite that some scientists believe holds evidence of life on Mars, is that its interior never rose above 50 degrees centigrade, despite being blasted from the Martian surface by an meteor impact and surviving a fiery a descent through Earth's opaque atmosphere.

"Spores," says Gerda Horneck, of DLR German Aerospace Center in Köln, "can withstand a variety of different hostile conditions: heat, radiation, desiccation, chemical substances, such as alcohol, acetone and others. They have an extremely long shelf life. This is because the sensitive material, the DNA, is especially packed and protected in the spores

In 2001, the inhabitants of Kerala in the sounthern India observed red rain falling during a two month period. One, Godfrey Louis, a physicist at nearby Cochin University of Science and Technology, intrigued by this phenomena, collected numerous samples of red rain to find out what was causing the contamination, perhaps sand or dust from some distant desert.

Examining the red rain under a microscopehe found that the rain water was filled with red cells that look remarkably like conventional bugs on Earth. What was strange was that Louis found no evidence of DNA in these cells which would rule out most kinds of known biological cells (red blood cells are one possibility but ought to be destroyed quickly by rain water).

Louis published his results in the peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space in 2006, along with the tentative suggestion that the cells could be extraterrestrial, perhaps from a comet that had disintegrated in the upper atmosphere and then seeded clouds as the cells floated down to Earth as well as reports in the region of a sonic boom-type noise, which could have been caused by the entry of an object in the upper atmosphere.

Since his initial discovery, Louis has intensified his study the cells with an international team including Chandra Wickramasinghe from the University of Cardiff in the UK and one of the leading proponents of the panspermia theory, which he developed in the latter half of the 20th century with the Fred Hoyle.

The team's new research show that the cells reproduce at a temperature of 121 degrees C. "Under these conditions daughter cells appear within the original mother cells and the number of cells in the samples increases with length of exposure to 121 degrees C," they report. By contrast, the cells are inert at room temperature. The spores of some extremophiles can survive these kinds of temperatures and then reproduce at lower temperatures but nothing discovered to date on Earth behaves like this at these temperatures -an extraordinary claim that will need to be independently verified before it will be more broadly accepted.

Alien Cells found in the rad rain in India

Wickramasinghe's team say they've examined the way these fluoresce when bombarded with light and say it is remarkably similar to various unexplained emission spectra seen in various parts of the galaxy. One such place is the Red Rectangle (image above), a cloud of dust and gas around a young star in the Monocerous constellation.

Casey Kazan

Sources:

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1008.4960: Growth And Replication Of Red Rain Cells At 121oC And Their Red Fluorescence
Space.com

For the first time, astronomers using NASA's Kepler space telescope
have confirmed a roughly Earth-size planet orbiting a sun-like star in
the so-called "Goldilocks" zone where water can exist in liquid form on
the surface and conditions may be favorable for life as it is known on
Earth.
Along with the confirmed extra-solar planet, one of 28 discovered so
far by Kepler, researchers today also announced the discovery of 1,094
new exoplanet candidates, pushing the spacecraft's total so far to
2,326, including 10 candidate Earth-size worlds orbiting in the
habitable zones of their parent stars.
Additional observations are required to tell if a candidate is, in
fact, an actual world. But astronomers say a planet known as Kepler-22b,
orbiting a star some 600 light years from Earth, is the real thing.

An artist's concept of Kepler-22b, a roughly
Earth-size world orbiting within the habitable zone of a sun-like star
600 light years from Earth.

(Credit:
NASA)

"Today I have the privilege of announcing the discovery of Kepler's
first planet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star, Kepler-22b," Bill
Borucki, the Kepler principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research
Center, told reporters. "It's 2.4 times the size of the Earth, it's in
an orbital period (or year) of 290 days, a little bit shorter than the
Earth's, it's a little bit closer to its star than Earth is to the sun,
15 percent closer.
"But the star is a little bit dimmer, it's a little bit lower in
temperature, a little bit smaller. That means that planet, Kepler-22b,
has a rather similar temperature to that of the Earth...If the
greenhouse warming were similar on this planet, its surface temperature
would be something like 72 Fahrenheit, a very pleasant temperature here
on Earth."
It is not yet known whether Kepler-22b is predominantly rocky,
liquid, or gaseous in composition, but the finding confirms for the
first time the long-held expectation that Earth-size planets do, in
fact, orbit other suns in the habitable zones of their host stars.
That, in turn, greatly improves the odds for the existence of life, as it is commonly defined, beyond Earth's solar system.

Related stories

"I think there are two things that are really exciting about
Kepler-22b," said Natalie Batalha, the deputy science team lead at Ames.
"One is that it's right in the middle of this habitable zone.
"The second thing that's really exciting is it's orbiting a star
very, very similar to our own sun. This is a solar analogue, almost a
solar twin, very similar to our own sun and you've got a planet 2.4
times the size of the Earth right smack in the habitable zone."
Equipped with a 95-megapixel digital camera, Kepler was launched from Cape Canaveral
on March 6, 2009. The camera is aimed at a patch of sky in the
constellation Cygnus that's the size of an outstretched hand that
contains more than 4.5 million detectable stars.
Of that total, some 300,000 are believed to be the right age, have
the right composition and the proper brightness to host Earth-like
planets. More than 156,000 of those, ranging from 600 to 3,000 light
years away, will be actively monitored by Kepler over the life of the
mission.
To find candidate planets, the spacecraft's camera monitors the
brightness of target stars in the instrument's wide field of view, on
the lookout for subtle changes that might indicate a world passing
between the star and the telescope. By studying the slight
dimming--comparable to watching a flea creep across a
car's
headlight at night--and by timing repeated cycles, computers can
identify potential extra-solar worlds even though the planets themselves
cannot be seen.

Earth's solar system and that of Kepler-22b
drawn to scale, showing the habitable zones of both stars and the
relative sizes of familiar planets.

(Credit:
NASA)

But it's a challenging observation. For a planet like Earth passing
in front of a star like the sun, the sun's light would dim by just 84
parts per million. To make sure an observation indicates the presence of
a real planet and not some other phenomena, measurements over multiple
orbits are required. For Earth-like planets in habitable-zone orbits, a
full three years is needed to confirm an initial observation.
In June 2010, the Kepler team announced 312 planet candidates, most
smaller than Neptune, in data collected over the first four months of
the mission. In February 2011, based on 13 months of data, the number
grew to 1,235 potential planets orbiting 997 stars.
The latest announcement pushes the total number of candidates to
2,326 possible planets orbiting 1,792 stars. Of that total, 367
stars--about 20 percent--show signs of multiple planet candidates.
Twenty-eight confirmed planets have been found in the Kepler data.
Including Earth-based telescopes, more than 600 extrasolar planets have
been found to date. But most of them are huge Jupiter-class worlds orbiting well outside the habitable zone.
With Kepler, "we're getting very close, we are really homing in on the true Earth-size habitable planets," Batalha said.
Also in the hunt: The SETI Institute, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, in Mountain View, Calif.
Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research at the
institute, said a radio telescope array that was looking for signs of
radio signals in the Kepler field of stars that might indicate the
presence of intelligent life is back in operation after a budget-driven hiatus earlier this year.
"I'm really pleased to announce as of 6:18 this morning, as the
Kepler field rose over the observatory, the ATA (Allen Telescope Array)
was back on the air, continuing the search for Earth analogues."
The Allen Telescope Array, originally funded by Microsoft co-founder
Paul Allen, is being used to make systematic observations of stars in
the Kepler field, on the lookout for any signs of artificial signals.
Citing a 1993 paper by Carl Sagan and four colleagues that used data
from NASA's Jupiter-bound Galileo spacecraft as a test for detecting
life on Earth, Tarter said "one of the strongest pieces of evidence for
life, indeed intelligent life on Earth, was the presence of narrow-band
pulse-amplitude-modulated radio transmissions."
"While there may be some uncertainty about how to define the
habitable zone, an exoplanet that could be detected through the
techno-signatures of its inhabitants would surely qualify as an Earth
analogue," she said.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Pyramids.
Are some alien? Scientists in China and Russia think so. Now, it seems
the hidden technology of those ancient structures is being activated as
massive pyramids around the globe are shooting pulsing streams of raw
energy deep into space. What is their purpose? Are they really conduits
of cosmic energy as some have claimed? Were some pyramids actually
designed by alien 'gods' that created a worldwide network of advanced
city-states based on their superscience? Who really knows? Well, maybe
the United States Air Force knows.

The Air Force's infamous supersecret base at Groom Lake, Nevada—also known as "Area 51" or "Dreamland"—has
just finished constructing a massive desert pyramid. Will it tie into
the network of ancient pyramids worldwide and draw upon alien technology
to absorb the rippling dimensional energies to power…what?

Energy beam projected from Bosnian pyramid [Artist conception]

World's pyramids reactivating

Pyramid technology is ancient and
global. Fantastic pyramids have been discovered beneath the twisted
growth of South American jungles, the ocean's floors, on high plateaus
and desolate deserts.

Some who've researched these ancient
silent stone sentinels are convinced that at least a few of the mighty
structures are actually advanced machines—machines engineered to
accomplish purposes so vast that the energies unleashed could dwarf
today's most advanced technology.

Mayan pyramid shooting energy beam into space

With the recent astonishing activity
of Aztec and Mayan pyramids, and the giant pyramid in Bosnia, the
hypothesis that some of the ancient structures are machines suddenly
appears entirely credible.

Giza pyramids compared to the possible Martian Cydonia pyramids

According to some bold science pioneers like Richard C. Hoagland,
the plains of Mars—specifically the Cydonia region—has pyramids. What
might be pyramids have also been found on regions of the lunar surface.

Pyramid power

Recently, Chinese scientists have activated a special team that has been studying the great Xianyang
pyramid that sits near Mount Baigong in the western province of
Qinghai, China. They are now closely monitoring the pyramid for signs it
might activate as others have.

Mysterious Xianyang pyramid — some scientists think it's alien

Giant machines capable of generating incredible amounts of energy…is
it really possible? The evidence suggests that it is, and if so it
raises the question: to what purpose will all that energy be put? The
Chinese think their famous flat-topped pyramid was used many thousands
of years ago as a landing pad to recharge the internal power of gigantic
alien ships.

A generator that may be able to pump
out megajoules of energy can be used for almost anything: opening
doorways to other universes, time travel, climate manipulation…even as a planetary defense system against careening space rocks or incoming attacking alien armadas.

The possibilities are almost endless.

Sign at perimeter of Area 51 warning that deadly force will be used

The Area 51 pyramid

Area 51, first brought to the public's attention by Las Vegas investigative television journalist George Knapp,
has long been a hotbed of UFO speculation and investigations into the
likelihood of the secretive desert base being used to reverse-engineer
captured alien technology.

The 'Extraterrestrial Highway' leading to Area 51

If true—and there's strong circumstantial evidence that at least some of the allegations made by Bob Lazar and others that the USAF top-secret test base is hip deep in ET artifacts and technology—then some of that technology must require a charge-up to power the unearthly devices.

The Chinese scientists may be on to something. For if the pyramid in Qinghai
truly was erected to power up extraterrestrial spacecraft, then the
USAF may require something similar when their scientists and engineers
reach the stage in the decades-long project to back-engineer unworldly
technology that's allegedly stumped some of the world's best thinkers for more than two generations.

If the USAF reached the stage where
they need a massive, alien-designed, power base they would more than
likely build a pyramidal structure very much like the one in China.

Comparison of Chinese flat-topped pyramid to Area 51 flat-topped pyramid

The USAF version also
appears to have some upgrades compared to the ancient Chinese version.
In particular a square receptical that sits in the middle of the
flattened top of the Area 51 pyramid.

For more than 20 years
UFO activity has been regularly spotted in and around Groom Lake.
Strange craft unlike any aircraft flown by any airforce have been seen
time and again hovering and manuevering over the nearby mountain range.

When the pyramid is
fully powered up and activated, there might be many more strange craft
skimming over the lonely Nevada desert than at any time in the past.